N thetterte
e night, late in the summer of 2012, discussion at my dinner table turned to the venerable topic of What to Be When You Grow Up. My older son, Griffin, then nine years old, wanted to be an “underwater paleontologist.” His little brother, Huck, then seven, wanted to be a monkey. “Do you know what I do for a living?” I asked Huck. His eyes grew wide. “All you do is sit on your computer and say, ‘Blah blah blah Congress, blah blah blah Mitt Romney’!” We all—OK, mostly my wife—got a big laugh out of that. For my birthday that year, she and the boys gave me a print emblazoned with Blah Blah Blah. It’s hanging in my office. Huck was not wrong. At the time, I was a journalist covering climate-change politics for a nonprofit Seattle news site calledGrist. I’d been with Grist almost ten years, and as my job had transitioned into full-time writing, I’d lived through—indeed, built a career on—the rise of blogging, social media, and hyperspeed news cycles. By the end of 2012 I was, God help me, a kind of boutique brand, with a reasonably well-known blog, a few cable-TV appearances under my belt, and more than 36,000 Twitter followers. I tweeted to them around 30 times a day, sometimes less but, believe it or not, gentle reader, sometimes much more. I belong to that exclusive Twitter club, not users who have been “verified” (curse their privileged names) but users who have hit the daily tweet limit, the social-media equivalent of getting cut off by the bartender. The few, the proud, the badly in need of help. It wasn’t just my job, though. My hobbies, my entertainment, my social life, my idle time—they had all moved online. I sought out a screen the moment I woke up.  I ate lunch at my desk. Around 6 p.m., I took a few hours for dinner, putting the kids to bed, and watching a little TV with the wife. Then, around 10 p.m., it was back to the Internet until 2 or 3 a.m. I was peering at one screen or another for something like 12 hours a day. From my perspective, that time involved a dazzling variety of activities: reading, blogging, gossiping, shopping, listening to music, watching movies. But from Huck’s perspective, I only ever did one thing: sit on my computer. Maybe he had a point. It wasn’t always this way. There was a time—it seems prehistoric now—when I started the workday by “getting caught up.” I’d go through my e-mail, check a few websites, and start on the day’s new tasks. By mid-2013, there was no such thing as caught up; there was, at best, keeping up. To step away from e-mail, news feeds, texts, chats, and social media for even a moment was to allow their deposited information to accumulate like snow in the driveway, a burden that grew every second it was neglected. I spent most of my daytime hours shoveling digital snow. The core of my job—researching, thinking, writing at greater-than-140-character length—I could accomplish only in the middle of the night, when things calmed down. I spent more and more hours working, or at least work adjacent, but got less and less done. Meanwhile, my mind and body adapted to the pace of digital life, with its ceaseless ping ping ping of notifications and alerts. I got twitchy if I was away from my phone for more than a few seconds. I felt it vibrating in my pocket when it wasn’t there, took it with me to bed, even to the bathroom. (I got pretty good at tweeting while I peed, to my enduring discredit.) All my in-between moments, the interstitial transitions and pauses that fill the cracks of a day, were crowded with pings. My mind was perpetually in the state that researcher and technology writer Linda Stone termed continuous partial attention. I was never completely where I was, never entirely doing what I was doing. I always had one eye on the virtual world. Every bit of conversation was a potential tweet, every sunset a potential Instagram. What had begun as blogging had become “lifecasting,” a manic, full-time performance of Internet David Roberts. With some lamentable exceptions, I was, and am, proud of Internet David Roberts. But he had flourished at the expense of the slump-shouldered, thick-bellied, bleary-eyed shut-in Huck saw sitting on the computer every day. That guy was wrung out. He needed some attention. I was 40 years old, due for a midlife crisis, and I didn’t want to have an affair or buy an impractical sports car, so instead I decided that I would take a break. A big one. For a year, I would leave behind online life to attend more closely to what we Internet people call meatspace. There are about 1,000 certified mindfulness-based stress-reduction instructors in the U.S. Photo: Grant Cornett There are about 1,000 certified mindfulness-based stress-reduction instructors in the U.S. Photo: Grant Cornett My bosses at Grist, supportive as always, agreed to an unpaid sabbatical. A year with no salary is not nothing, but my wife brings home considerably more of the bacon than I do anyway, so with some belt tightening, we figured we could manage me taking my feet off the pedals and coasting a bit. If you’re wondering, yes, my wife is the coolest person on the planet, and yes, she will get her year someday. In August 2013, I wrote a postannouncing my plan to unplug. I explained that I was desperately burned out and cited two goals for my year off: to regain my physical health and work on a novel. I was a little nervous I’d be deemed a weenie; instead my post unleashed a torrent of goodwill. Soon there were more than 300 comments, almost every one positive and supportive (the Internet equivalent of Sasquatch riding by on a unicorn). People e-mailed, they called, they wrote actual paper letters. I heard two things over and over again: “I know exactly how you feel” and “I’m so glad you’re doing this.” Lots and lots of people would like a break from hyperconnected life, but very few have concrete plans to take one. It’s not surprising: in white-collar work, the expectation of round-the-clock connectivity has become pervasive, bleeding into nights, weekends, and vacations. A survey by the Center for Creative Leadership found that smartphone-carrying professionals “report interacting with work a whopping 13.5 hours every workday.” And for more and more Americans, social circles have moved at least partially online. According to Pew Research, as of 2013, 73 percent of adult Internet users are on social media. Among those 18 to 29, it’s now 89 percent. It has long since become many people’s primary means of keeping tabs on friends and family. Being offline can feel like being invisible. So it was with trepidation that I began my sabbatical on September 1, 2013. I didn’t go full Luddite or “quit the Internet.” I used Google Maps to get around, maintained my long-runningWords with Friends rivalry with my aunt, and bought flip-flops on Zappos. But I did have some hard-and-fast rules: no work, work-related e-mail, or work-related reading. No daily news cycles or social media. Most of all, I would not blog, tweet, share, pin, like, star, favorite, or forward anything. Internet David Roberts would go silent. By the time you read this, I’ll be back to the grind. While I haven’t unearthed any cosmic truths (except: not working beats working), over the past year I have developed some tools and techniques that help me feel calmer, more at peace, and better equipped to navigate the pings of modern life. Will it be enough? I don’t know. ---- I was standing on my locked left leg, hunched over, trying to grab the bottom of my lifted-up right foot, and after a few slippery failures I had a grip. Hey, hot yoga isn’t so hard! My fingers were turning white with the effort when the teacher said, “And now, lift your leg straight up in front of you and lock your knee.” My laugh, a strangled snort, produced a sprinkler of sweat. I thought it was gallows humor. The teacher gave me a look as all around legs popped up, locked in perfect right angles, torsos bent double. I spent most of that first class on my back, trying to slow my racing heart, pondering the great irony that after years of sedentary living it was exercise that was going to kill me. I almost didn’t go back. Those early days of screenlessness were bewildering. My mind, wound up like a top for years, continued spinning. I experienced sporadic surges of angst and adrenaline, sure I was supposed to be doing… something. I’d pull my phone out every few minutes, even though no one was e-mailing me and I’d uninstalled all social-media apps. The habits and mental agitations of digital work life persisted like phantom limbs. My symptoms were testament to the power of what psychologists call variable intermittent reinforcement. Famed behaviorist B. F. Skinner discovered long ago that if you really want to ingrain a habit, you encourage it with rewards that arrive at variable times, in variable sizes. The lab rat knows that it will periodically be given food for pressing the lever, but not exactly when or how much. The result: a compulsive rat. It’s the same with humans. Variable intermittent reinforcement explains why slot machines are so enthralling, why video games contain hidden caches of coins or weapons, and why we’re all helpless before  our e-mail accounts. One time you check your inbox and there’s a single new message, from LinkedIn, which reminds you that you can’t figure out how to delete your LinkedIn account. Sad face. The next time you check, you have five new messages, including one from an old friend and another from a potential employer. Happy face! So you check, check, check. What’s true of e-mail is true of more and more software—the hot trend is to “gamify” everything, which just means using intermittent reinforcement to hook users. It’s no accident that you can earn points or badges in virtually every app these days. The kinds of rewards offered in online communities are particularly compelling, based on what Dan Siegel, a UCLA professor of psychiatry and executive director of the Mindsight Institute, calls contingent communication. It happens, he told me, when “a signal sent gets a signal back.” That simple act, evoking a response from another mind, is a key feature of early childhood development and remains “deeply rewarding,” Siegel said, satisfying primordial instincts shaped by our evolution as a social species. A 2012 study by two Boston University psychologists found that Facebook use is driven by two “primary needs”—the “need for self-presentation” and the “need to belong.” Broadcast and be acknowledged: that’s a ping. Each one affirms our existence as efficacious agents in the world and prompts a squirt of reinforcing hormones from the brain’s reward center. “That,” Siegel said, “is why people will respond to a text while driving a two-ton vehicle.” There was a 48.4 percent increase in mobile screen time between 2012 and 2013 alone. Photo: Grant Cornett We online denizens come to need these regular low-level jolts and get antsy without them. That’s why I was tweeting in the bathroom. That’s why your friends around the table at the bar are all staring at their phones. Ordinary life has come to seem torpid and drab relative to the cascade of affirmations we find in contingent online communication. When I cut myself off from the cycle, I went into withdrawal. Hot yoga was the first step in my recovery. I chose it somewhat at random, but it turned out to be just what the life coach ordered. Though scientific research into the cognitive and emotional effects of hyperconnectivity remains nascent, there is no shortage of counsel available to the frazzled. The anxieties of modern digital life have created a burgeoning industry of websites, consultants, therapists, and “thought leaders” devoted to easing our always-on angst. They tend to fall into two broad camps. The first preaches the gospel of “life hacking,” which amounts, as one upbeat blog put it, to “project-managing your life.” For the life hacker, productivity is the ur-goal. Distractions, inefficiencies, and bad habits are blockages to be flushed by performance-boosting tweaks. And so they offer better to-do lists and time schedulers, four-minute workouts and five-minute power naps, e-mail filters and syncers of various things with various other things. Modern digital life cannot be avoided, they say, but it can be managed and optimized. I’ve attempted to adopt some life-hacking techniques over the years. I’ve certainly wasted countless hours reading about them. But they tend to require a level of stick-to-itiveness and self-discipline that I lack. How does one muster the wherewithal to implement and maintain all that stuff anyway? Ah, here it is, on Lifehack.com’s “29 Ways to Beat Procrastination Once and For All” list: “Become mindful.” Reminds me of that old joke about how an economist proposes to open a can: “First, assume a can opener.” And then there’s the second camp, which approaches digital overload from a groovier, more spiritual angle. Here we are encouraged to “disconnect to reconnect,” according to the tagline ofDigital Detox, a Bay Area organizer of device-free workshops and retreats. A flier for events the group cohosted in L.A. and San Francisco in March to celebrate a National Day of Unpluggingpromised an “analog zone” with friendship bracelets, face painting, nicknaming, typewriters, and smiles. Writer and critic Nathan Jurgenson has dubbed this crowd, which now includes such worthies as Arianna Huffington and Deepak Chopra, “the disconnectionists.”